For ten days, the Festival des Libertés will reside in the National Theater and will wrap the entire building in its soul, its colors, its doubts and its commitments. Emerging and renowned artists, all committed to a critical and interrogative thought process, powerful or nuanced, have been invited to paint this space for free and eclectic expression.
When normalizing powers write in their heads, some of these artists respond by writing on walls. Parole et Obêtre have known repression as well as recognition and appropriation for their graffiti. Their small toys, childish in appearance, tackle serious subjects, sometimes violent, often censured. We can be an automaton at times. But we can also activate the controls... Denis Meyers's urban typographies will cover the surfaces of the theater with questions, reflections or claims. Palimpsests to be deciphered up close or from afar. The universe of street art is a land of insecurity, where the social ladder no longer moves upwards and riots are an everyday possibility. We must learn how to rebound, to use the body's elasticity to oppose the dull fabric of architecture. Denis Darzacq has photographed these lives in unstable equilibrium.
In the chaos of a world that transforms material overabundance into artificial magic, our inner selves and our humanity are becoming more and more precarious, as in Adrian Jurado's frescoes. Through her portraits of twins, Martina Bacigalupo scrutinizes the singularity within the same, the difference within conformity. She also uncovers the role of the other, from whom we hope to demark ourselves but who also supports our identity process.
Resisting conformism and lazy simplification, these works offer at least two level of interpretation and require active reasoning from the audience. The exhibition space was curated by Béatrice Massinger, scenographist who tames locations by filling them with meaning, harmony and conviviality. They are also meant to challenge and invite the audience to leave the superhighways of conformist thought and to topple our standardized visions.
A Bruxelles Laïque asbl organisation | Tel: +32 2 289 69 00 | In collaboration with Unie Vrijzinnige Verenigingen, Théâtre National and KVS | info@festivaldeslibertes.be
